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Tracing Baja California’s evolution, one bottle of wine at a time

VALLE DE GUADALUPE, Baja California, Mexico – The turnaround point in
Valle de Guadalupe’s advertised “Ruta del Vino,” or “Wine Route,” lies
about 25 minutes east of the coastal highway that leads north to
Tijuana.

Here, buses filled with tourists park and unload at the southern
entrance of the L.A. Cetto winery, Mexico’s largest winery. It’s a
little after 10 a.m. on a Sunday.

A large portion of the tourists, engraved wine glasses in hand,
gathers around two tour guides for a basic demonstration on how to
evaluate and taste wine. At one point, the guests are asked to take a
sip of wine, breathe in through the mouth, and then swallow the wine
while exhaling through the nose. The motion, which produces an obnoxious
slurping noise, is meant to oxidize the wine and alter its flavor.
Predictable giggles and a few spills follow.

The slurping demo is emblematic of the Valle de Guadalupe experience,
whose Wine Route features more than 70 wineries, all producing,
bottling and distributing wines year-round. The booming business is a
cause for celebration, and Mexico is raising a glass to what the region
has to offer.

“There’s a lot of people that thought before you couldn’t come to
Mexico because of the violence,” said Adrian Sandoval, one of the tour
guides. “It’s not like that…. One of the things we have to show is the
cultural, the culinary and all the wine vineyards.”

Sandoval, 24, studied culinary arts at the Autonomous University of
Baja California in Ensenada. With dreams of opening up his own
restaurant, he knew he needed to learn more about wine and how to pair
it with different dishes. He got a job at the L.A. Cetto winery in Valle
de Guadalupe about a year ago and now leads tours of the location both
in English and Spanish.

Sandoval and the guides at L.A. Cetto call themselves, perhaps
jokingly, the “Avengers” of the winery. Like many other young,
gastronomically inclined Mexicans, they want to be a part of a culinary
world whose doors just recently opened.

“Now I have a respect for the beverage,” Sandoval said. “I know all
the processes (behind it), all the people involved in the process to
give you the final product.”

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L.A. Cetto was there at the start of the wine revolution in Mexico.
Established in 1928 by Don Angelo Cetto, it is one of the oldest
wineries in the region, deeper into the Valle de Guadalupe and with a
more extensive advertising campaign — you can see billboards advertising
its name up in Tijuana, some 70 miles away. It is also the largest
winery in Mexico – it has 1,200 hectares of vineyards total (around
1,200 athletic fields) and produces about 12 million liters of wine a
year.

With the large size comes large variety: Sandoval said L.A. Cetto
makes up to 60 varieties of wine, from aromatic viogniers to deep
cabernet sauvignons. They are able to produce so many different wines
because of the multiple types of soils found in Valle de Guadalupe, he
said.

“You can walk about one mile, but at the end of that mile it’s a
different soil,” he said. “That lets us have richer variety in a smaller
space.” The harvest season for the grape won’t start until late July or
early August and will run until the end of October. The rest of the
year is spent bottling and distributing wines.

L.A. Cetto wines — and those of neighboring wineries like Monte Xanic
and Barón Balché — often end up on both sides of the border, purchased
by restaurants and store owners, including some in Arizona, looking to
pair Mexican food with Mexican wine. L.A. Cetto exports about 35 percent
of all its wine, Sandoval said.

The spike in wine tourism started a couple years ago. It was after
the region experienced its worst bouts of violence, spearheaded by
powerful cartels moving drugs and people across the border. Concerts by
popular artists were scheduled around Baja California, and celebrity
chefs from Mexico decided to open up restaurants in Tijuana and San
Diego. The region’s tacos are some of the most well-known around the
world. A new fusion cuisine, “Baja Med,” was created using the seafood
and produce of the coastal cities.

“This area is now known on an international level,” said Arcelia
Velasco, a visitor from Ensenada. “They don’t have to be afraid to come
visit.”

Regional wine became a natural fit with these new ventures. Now, the
L.A. Cetto winery can see up to 3,000 visitors on a busy day during the
Holy Week or spring break periods.

“This is hard business when you work in a restaurant or vineyard,
because the vacations or holidays are the days they most need you to
work,” Sandoval said. “Since I entered this career, they told me …
‘Forget all the holidays.’”

For tourists, the L.A. Cetto experience is “choose your own
adventure.” You can decide what selection of wines you would like to
taste: traditional, reserve or premium. You can reserve a tour of the
fermentation and aging rooms (where hundreds of oak barrels — some
tagged by mischievous visitors — hold some of the finer wines for up to
25 months). You can secure the terrace for a wedding proposal. Or if
you’re there at the right time of the year, you can watch a traditional
bullfight in the winery’s ring, overlooking the vineyards. There is also
the boutique, where you can purchase most all the wines produced by the
winery.

This may come off as elegant on paper, but Sandoval stresses that
L.A. Cetto is trying to appeal to even the most casual of wine drinkers.
You could find an L.A. Cetto bottle of traditional cabernet sauvignon
for $6 or $7 at a Walmart along the border, for instance.

“We have a really huge production of wines, and that can let us make
the prices more affordable,” Sandoval said. “That’s the philosophy of
our winery.”

The tourists come from all across Mexico, from as far as Sinaloa and
as close as Ensenada. In San Ysidro, California, hotel brochures
advertise Valle de Guadalupe and other wineries in San Diego. Sandoval
and his colleagues recount stories of drunk spring breakers exiting
their tour bus at L.A. Cetto, beer cans in hand, after visiting dozens
of other wineries on the Wine Route.

For the Mexican tourists, these experiences are shifting the image of
Baja California from one shadowed by the previous decade’s violence to
one looking to a brighter future.

“I think that many of the tourists here … will spread the word that
everything is much more calm,” said Ismael Velazquez, a visitor from
Ensenada. “It’s not like before. The situation from before is improving.
The fear is going away.”

Yolanda Godoy, who traveled from Tijuana in one of the tour buses,
believes the Valle de Guadalupe brings nothing but positives to Baja
California.

“We have many beautiful things in this region,” she said. “It’s not
just negative things. We also want to show the beautiful things we
have.”

For Sandoval, working at the local wineries is a chance to share a
unique piece of Mexican culture, as well as to enjoy the tranquility
that comes with isolation.

“The first days you start working here you’re amazed about all the
beautiful views, but then it becomes common,” he said. “There’s a lot of
people that are sitting in an office instead of viewing this landscape
between all the mountains. I’m starting to feel really small.”

- 30 -

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Visitors tour the L.A. Cetto Winery aging room on an April Sunday. The winery, in Valle de Guadalupe, Baja California, Mexico, is the largest winery in the country at 1,200 hectares (about 2,965 acres).

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